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A review by cartwright
The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us by Paul Tough
5.0
This book said the things that I felt but didn’t really have the right way to put into words. Namely, how could I (a “Doubly Disadvantaged” to use the book’s lingo) feel that going to an elite school changed my life, while most of the rich white people I hang out with now view it as not necessarily providing a huge advantage over the flagship state school—while at the same time doing everything humanly possible to get their kid into the best school possible? And why, went I went to an elite undergrad, were most of the minority students very wealthy and from similar prep schools as the white kids? This book does a nice job bringing out the social factors behind this paradigm (the “Privileged Poor” and the social codes), and put words to what I experienced as well: how could college simultaneously be a liberating/empowering/life-changing experience and a painful/disorienting/emotionally draining experience?
Or, put more eloquently by him:
“Engaging with their peers made them feel like strangers in a place they could not fully call home,” Jack wrote in The Privileged Poor. “These encounters, which many of the Doubly Disadvantaged saw as assaults on their way of life, left them feeling socially isolated, emotionally drained, and, sometimes, angry. Their social and emotional well-being suffered. They encountered tacit social codes that they had never learned and that they struggled to decipher.” Privileged Poor students, by contrast, were quite familiar with those tacit social codes. They had been marinating in them for four years of high school. For them, the transition to the Ivy League was often actually straightforward, even easy. “Their high schools were a preview,” Jack wrote, “a four-year trailer to the main feature.”
And to quote another section:
The people who gave out competitive scholarships and read college applications were moved by the fact that she had experienced such pain and remained a straight-A student. It was a story they wanted to hear: the homeless teen who made good. So she told it, again and again. And telling it made her feel sad and sometimes proud, but eventually mostly angry and more than a little cynical. The whole process began to feel transactional, like she was trading her pain for college admission offers and scholarship dollars. The worst year of her life had become a commodity.
It definitely left a feeling of being fraudulent, that I was trading aspects of my upbringing (living in an abandoned hospital) in exchange for admission into an elite club—while betraying the people who knew me growing up, who wouldn’t view my upbringing as challenging, who would view my relaying those anecdotes as dramatizing for effect?
Definitely worth reading.
Or, put more eloquently by him:
“Engaging with their peers made them feel like strangers in a place they could not fully call home,” Jack wrote in The Privileged Poor. “These encounters, which many of the Doubly Disadvantaged saw as assaults on their way of life, left them feeling socially isolated, emotionally drained, and, sometimes, angry. Their social and emotional well-being suffered. They encountered tacit social codes that they had never learned and that they struggled to decipher.” Privileged Poor students, by contrast, were quite familiar with those tacit social codes. They had been marinating in them for four years of high school. For them, the transition to the Ivy League was often actually straightforward, even easy. “Their high schools were a preview,” Jack wrote, “a four-year trailer to the main feature.”
And to quote another section:
The people who gave out competitive scholarships and read college applications were moved by the fact that she had experienced such pain and remained a straight-A student. It was a story they wanted to hear: the homeless teen who made good. So she told it, again and again. And telling it made her feel sad and sometimes proud, but eventually mostly angry and more than a little cynical. The whole process began to feel transactional, like she was trading her pain for college admission offers and scholarship dollars. The worst year of her life had become a commodity.
It definitely left a feeling of being fraudulent, that I was trading aspects of my upbringing (living in an abandoned hospital) in exchange for admission into an elite club—while betraying the people who knew me growing up, who wouldn’t view my upbringing as challenging, who would view my relaying those anecdotes as dramatizing for effect?
Definitely worth reading.